Mild spoilers follow for Mass Effect and Fire Emblem: Awakening. (I mention that they have endings, but there aren’t any actual plot details involved.)

I’ve never been one to get emotional at the end of movies, but other varieties of media are another matter entirely. There’s a running joke in my friend group that I don’t actually have emotions, but that’s just because very few of them have ever seen me finishing a series at 1 AM in the morning and trying hard not to cry. But why, exactly is that?

Emotional investment is a topic that I touched on (twice) last year, although I was mainly focused on emotional investment as expectation. However, emotional investment can also refer to the amount of time that you have spent involved with the work in question. Movies, with their usual run-time of (at most) an hour or two, are a relatively low-risk, low-reward option. If a movie ending is underwhelming, you don’t feel as cheated because you only invested a few hours of time into it. On the other hand, if the ending of a TV series or video game doesn’t meet expectations, it’s inevitable that a significant portion of the fandom will be up in arms about it.

Everyone say “Normandy!”

Take, for example, the ending of Mass Effect 3. When it was initially released, the general reaction was outrage. It was “too inconclusive” or “too out of the blue” or simply “not good enough.” The outcry was enough that BioWare (bless their hearts) released the Extended Cut, a longer version of the ending that elaborated on all of the “inconclusive” plot points and added more build-up in the final moments to make the ending seem less “out of the blue.” The release of Citadel–a DLC that was, in essence, a love letter to the fans and the entire franchise–helped even more.

I have an admitted soft spot for the ME3 ending: partially because by the first time I played it, I had the Extended Cut and Citadel; but also because I wanted the feeling of having to work towards my happy ending. Even if I had disliked the ending, I don’t think it would have colored my feelings toward the franchise as a whole. By the time that I finished the final mission of Mass Effect 3, I had spent over 100 hours with its cast of characters, shared in their best and worst moments, and had my character fall in love. If a few minutes at the end were enough to make it “RUINED FOREVER” for me… well, that would probably mean that it had never meant that much to me to begin with.

“There are better places to take a nap than on the ground, you know.”

Then, on the other hand, there’s Fire Emblem: Awakening. No controversies about the ending here (well, at least, none that I’ve heard of). Instead, the game is almost entirely about the journey. The plot isn’t what matters here, it’s the characters. Their relationships with your character and each other is what makes the game great rather than merely good.

Normally, I don’t get particularly into shipping characters, but that all flies out the window in the face of Awakening and I start shipping everyone with EVERYONE. Do I like Olivia more when she’s building a theater with Robin, or bonding with Henry over their love of cute animals? Is Lon’qu more endearing when awkwardly interacting with Lissa, or being used as Miriel’s test subject? WILL I EVER GET OVER HOW ADORABLE MORGAN IS WITH EVERYONE?*

*no. the answer is no.

So, what have I learned from tossing out this giant amalgamation of words and feels into a text box? Well, firstly, I learned that my level of articulation sharply drops when I’m trying to express FEELS. And secondly, that I really want to start a fourth full playthrough of the Mass Effect trilogy. Or an eleventh full playthrough of Awakening. For… reasons.

Recently, I resumed the running of a campaign of Dungeons & Dragons that had been on hiatus for the better part of a year. The initial session of the campaign, involving the party rescuing a company of soldiers from a besieged fort, went off (mostly) without a hitch. Most of the session went as expected: the ranger employed his eagle companion to scout, the rogue scouted out the enemy camps using his ring of invisibility, and the wu jen tried to impress upon the blood magus the importance of cleanliness. Other things were more of a surprise: the party pooled their skills to poison a full camp of enemy soldiers, and decided to adopt what I had originally intended as one-off NPCs as full-fledged support staff for their party.

I spent a good portion of the weekend drawing up character sheets for said NPCs, crafting a series of characters that would accompany our party–fleshing out their personalities as well as their statistics, gear, and specializations. Knowing that my party wanted to bring along a few dozen soldiers significantly altered my long term campaign plans, but it also gave me a plethora of new ideas for other situations that they could get into. Running even a single session filled me with creative energy, energy that will be enough to spark a positive feedback cycle of increased creativity. (I apologize for using scientific terms, but they seemed appropriate.)

My favorite part of tabletop games, and others like them, is not the gameplay, but rather the excitement of banding together with a group of like-minded people and collectively telling a story. Every action that each participant takes has the potential to have a major effect on the storyline. A character who loses his or her temper at the wrong time can destroy other party members’ attempts at diplomatic relations. On the other hand, a significantly silver-tongued player can deftly dismantle combat situations, profiting the entire party without having to lift a finger. Every choice that the players make has the potential to be fantastic, and the choices they make are limited only by their imaginations.

As a child, I was always interested in writing stories of my own, or shaping existing stories to fit what I thought they should be. I was never fond of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, though: I found them too narrow, too restrictive, and very often telling stories that I didn’t actually want to hear. “I grabbed the sword because I wanted to go kill the dragon that killed me in the other story path, not because I wanted to become king!” (Or similar complaint.)

It’s for that reason that I was so intrigued by the release of Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor late last year. On the surface, it’s a fairly straightforward plot: you’re a ranger, you have a wraith buddy, and you fight crime orcs. When you get down to gameplay, though, the story is a lot deeper than it seems. The “Nemesis” system, which uses procedural generation to create unique captains, each with their own personality traits and names. As each one of them gains more power, they become more formidable combatants and gain more followers.

The real story of the game, then, is not about the player, but about their enemies. If you’re not thorough enough in finishing them off, they can survive your assassination attempts and come back more powerful than ever. My friend told me about one particular captain who survived no less than eight attempts to kill him, becoming more and more powerful. The most interesting thing about this plot, to me, was that it was completely incidental. No two stories were exactly the same, just like no two D&D campaigns are exactly the same.

That’s all for now! Once I’m more securely settled in at college, posts will resume on a more regular basis. Signing off, until next week!

A few days ago, I received a rather impertinent question from my younger sister. Along with my brothers, I had been expressing extravagant feelings of sorrow over the fate of a character in a game (more on that later). “Why are you acting so sad?” she said with all the condescension a nine-year-old can muster. “They’re just fake characters in a video game. They’re not real.”

While the first thing that came to mind was the equally condescending “A youngling like you couldn’t possibly understand,” the question that she raised was valid enough to be worth a little introspection. After all, I have noticed myself developing an increasing interest in traditional fan activities–like, for instance, shipping. Over the past few years, I’ve experienced a variety of works that took me on an emotional roller-coaster from giddy joy to downtrodden despair. In fact, I believe that my capacity for emotional investment increases with every new story I experience.

Before I go any further, I suppose that I should explain what exactly I mean by emotional investment. The way that I look at it, your potential for enjoying a work is directly proportional to how much of your self they are willing to invest in it–to put it mathematically, how much you enjoy a work is directly correlated to how much you’re willing to enjoy it. For example, let’s say that you have decided that the newest TV show is going to be excellent, and hyped yourself accordingly. If the work is as you expected, the payoff is equal or greater than the energy put in. If it exceeds expectations, then the payoff of enjoyment is greater than the energy put in, leaving you with a natural high known as “pleasant surprise.” On the other hand, if the work falls far short of your expectations, then you’ve wasted a great deal of time and energy. Thus, enjoying a work is a calculated risk.

If you’re still following me after that spiel, I congratulate you. The time has come to move on to the examples, so buckle up, because things are about to get emotional.

The lament which prompted the Impertinent Question mentioned at the beginning of the article had to do with Fritz, a minor character in Valkyria Chronicles who appears for approximately a minute and a half. When he first arrives on the scene, he appears to be just another one of the faceless Imperial soldiers carrying out the invasion of The Anime Netherlands Gallia: armored, carrying a gun, and about to discover the backwoods cabin where protagonists Welkin and Alicia are hiding out. However, rather than attacking the protagonists–members of the enemy army–he begs for their help. Wounded during the skirmish in the woods and near delirious with the pain, he cries for his mother as the protagonists give him medical treatment only to succumb to his wounds. Alicia comforts him during his dying moments, tearfully telling him that “Mother’s here for you,” as he slips away.

“We always did call him a mama’s boy, sir…”

The following morning, the rest of the Imperial unit arrives and holds the two Gallian officers at gunpoint. However, upon realizing that Welkin and Alicia attempted to save Fritz, the Imperial officer thanks the protagonists, saying that he considers his squad to be a part of his own family. After this exchange, he tells the protagonists to return to their unit, saying that he wishes they could have met under different circumstances.

While this is only a little moment–some five minutes or so out of a game dozens of hours long–it is effective at demonstrating emotional investment. By the time that this particular scene rolls around, the player’s forces will have killed hundreds of nameless and faceless Imperial soldiers over the course of a dozen-odd operations. By putting this scene in, Valkyria delivers a powerful (if rather heavy-handed) message about the reality and horror of war. This, in turn, led me to a greater appreciation of the way the story was constructed, and thus towards a greater emotional investment in the story. As I’ve mentioned to a few of my friends, Valkyria Chronicles continues to tear out my heart and stomp on it. At the moment, though, I’m surprisingly okay with that.

(This post got a little long, so I decided to split it in two. Part two, discussing The Legend of Korra, can be found here!)

“Nothing can kill a show like too much exposition.” This line, delivered in a conversation between the marvelously meta Little Sally and Officer Lockstock, perfectly encompasses the dilemma that writers face. Nothing is more irritating than an insufficiently developed setting, but throwing out too much at the same time can leave viewers feeling completely lost.

Take, for example, the otherwise excellent anime Fate/Zero. While the show is packed with epic fight scenes, deep psychological drama, and a cast of diverse and unforgettable characters, the first episode is essentially a fifty-minute infodump outlining the setting. Everything from the mechanics of magic to the very identities of the characters is told rather than shown. Magic is explained through the framing device of a college lecture, and the general backstories of two characters are explained entirely through reports about them that other characters are reading. While admirable in getting all of the background information out of the way, this method isn’t particularly pleasing from a storytelling point of view. Though this is quickly amended by subsequent episodes, the extreme density of the exposition in the first episode is enough to scare away many potential viewers.

Urinetown, on the other hand, is much more circumspect about its exposition, using its medium awareness to poke tongue-in-cheek fun at exposition even while delivering it. Minor plot points, such as the water shortage and the political maneuvering of the social elite, are delivered in casual monologues or musical numbers sprinkled through the first quarter of the show. Since they are intentionally delivering exposition to the audience, it also removes the problem of the “As You Know Speech”, a particularly mind-numbing brand of exposition in which information is delivered to characters who should already know perfectly well. (Hypothetical example: “As you know, this engine is powered by science, as you explained last week at the party we attended with our intelligent and attractive friends. Also, I’m going to tell you the names of our intelligent and attractive friends, just in case you forgot.”)

On the other side of the spectrum are works such as Mass Effect, where the lion’s share of the exposition is completely optional. By simply playing through the game, you’ll learn that the human colony world of Eden Prime is a fairly prosperous location, but vulnerable to attacks from aliens such as the geth. This, in itself, is fine. It’s all you need to know about the location’s relevance to the plot, and since it’s only the first mission of the game, the Eden Prime colony doesn’t stay relevant for long. If, however, you look around closer, you’ll discover a great deal of information on the location that enhances your understanding of the setting: its population (3.7 million, as of 2183), day length (64.1 Earth hours), average surface temperature (23 degrees Celsius), atmospheric pressure (1.45 atm), orbital distance (1.85 AU), and mass (1.253 Earth masses).

Is this information essential for your enjoyment of the work? Certainly not. Does it enhance the setting? It certainly does. By showing their work, the team behind Mass Effect puts the “science” in science fiction. Meticulous explanation of each story element gives the setting a depth that would be difficult to accomplish otherwise, but the fact that all of it it optional keeps it from alienating the type of player who just wants to shoot aliens without worrying about whether nitrogen or carbon dioxide is more abundant in the atmosphere.

The “optional” exposition can also be found in my favorite work to use as an example, The Lord of the Rings. The first chapter doesn’t begin until almost fifty pages into the book, by which time we have been given information on everything from the history of the world to the history of smoking. However, just as it does in other works, this passage allows readers to better appreciate the story.

Exposition is a critical part of storytelling, and how it’s used can make or break a work. I’ll continue making my way through story structure in the weeks to come. Signing off!

Spoilers follow for: The Horse and His Boy, Inception, Fire Emblem Awakening, and the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring.

In my opinion, the beginning of any story is one of the most important parts. The tone and style of the beginning will set a precedent for the rest of the story. Subverting the expectations of the audience can be an effective tactic, but the general tactic is to use the very beginning of a story as both a high point and a hook into the rest of the story. If the audience is not sold on the opening, they are less likely to finish the story–especially in the cases of longer media such as books or video games.

For instance, one of my favorite audiobooks when I was younger was the Focus on the Family Radio Theater adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. Those who have read the book know that it starts off fairly slowly, spending quite some time introducing the everyday life of the protagonist, Shasta, before he makes his escape with the talking horse Bree. As far as exposition goes this is fairly normal, but the audiobook adaptation wants to make very clear from the beginning that this is a story packed with action. Accordingly, the adaptation begins with a flashback which shows a child being carried away from a great battle between a nobleman and an undisclosed opponent. In addition to establishing the story as a swashbuckling epic rife with intrigue, it also foreshadows one of the major plot twists of the book, through a single, simple scene under a minute in duration.

In other cases, the scene can be taken from a later point in the work. This technique, known as in medias res (“in the middle of the story”), is used in many works, from Greek drama to modern film. A fairly recent example is the film Inception, which opens with a scene from near the end. Cobb, the protagonist, washes up on a beach and is taken into custody by uniformed soldiers. Taken before their leader Saito, he begins an explanation, which quickly segues into the actual beginning of the story. The chronological beginning provides most of the action, while showing a much younger Saito alongside an unchanged Cobb. This helps to establish the odd, dreamlike chronology of the film while also providing a precedent for the sort of action sequences that will recur throughout.

A much more dramatic version of in medias res opens up Fire Emblem: Awakening. The first chapter, titled “Premonition: Invisible Ties” shows the valiant Prince Chrom and his faithful tactician Robin locked in battle with the evil sorcerer, Validar. Those familiar with the series will recognize Validar as the main focus villain of the game: the series tradition of preceding the final boss with a conniving dark mage holds true, as usual. The real shock of the opening, however, comes after the battle is over: Robin, apparently suffering from some sort of fit, stabs and kills Chrom. Only then does the game itself start, beginning with Chrom and Robin’s original meeting and progressing from there. While this sort of revelation would likely be shocking in the context of the game as a whole, putting it in a premonition at the beginning lends even the pastoral early chapters a sense of foreboding.

As a final example, compare the film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring with its source material. There is a clear difference in how they begin. The film, lacking Tolkien’s lengthy preface to give a general idea of the world or how the Ring came to be, uses Tolkien’s myth arc as the hook to draw the audience into the movie. The film is very clear from the start that this movie is an epic fantasy: there are warring armies in shining armor dueling the forces of darkness, an epic showdown with the Dark Lord himself, and a frightening demonstration of the Ring’s corrupting influence. This handily demonstrates everything that a layman needs to know about The Lord of the Rings: it’s grand in scope, sprawling in setting, and steeped in rich backstory. Even when the scene shifts to the peaceful Shire and covers the first leg of Frodo’s journey, it is interspersed with Gandalf’s travels to Minas Tirith and Isengard to gather information about the Ring.

Tolkien himself prefers a more subtle method of storytelling: if you begin at the first chapter of the book rather than the Preface, the information is revealed gradually. Bilbo’s ownership of the Ring is hinted at rather than outright stated, told through the eyes of third-hand sources or cryptically hinted at in conversations. When Gandalf mysteriously fails to show up at the beginning of Frodo’s journey, it’s cause for curiosity but not alarm: we haven’t been told what he’s up to, and wizards are meant to be mysterious anyway. Lastly, without the establishing shots of Black Riders spurring their horses forth from evil towers or cutting down innocent gatekeepers, they remain a mystery: perhaps just a group of oddly dressed solicitors, trying to track down Mr. Baggins to inform him that he has won the Mordor Lottery.

No moral of the story or special ending message this week. I’m considering doing more posts on story structure in the future, so let me know what you think in the comments below. Until next week!

This post comes a bit later than I usually put them up, but for good reason. I hadn’t anticipated climbing back up on my soapbox so soon. In fact, my original plan for this week was a breakdown of Shakespearean power couples. That, however, was thrown to the wayside when I caught a glimpse of the news while eating dinner before a trip to the symphony. The clip can be found here, but for the benefit of those who don’t click links I’ll summarize. The CNN analyst was discussing the launch of the new “It’s On Us” campaign and the concept of new “Yes Means Yes” laws–something that would be a definite triumph for survivors’ rights if passed. My interest in the subject rose as they brought on a student from UCLA who had founded a survivor’s rights group after her own sexual assault.

If I had stopped watching there, I probably would have left the restaurant with feelings of goodwill to the human race. CNN had different things in mind. Immediately following the student was a middle-aged woman who had actually been brought into the studio; as I recall, a Princeton alumna who had stressed the importance of young women “marrying smart.” She almost immediately tore into the UCLA student’s arguments with obvious vigor: “No, consent isn’t “sexy”. It kills the mood.” “Consent has nothing to do with good sex.” “This Yes Means Yes thing is just going to needlessly complicate the process of dating for young men who are already confused enough.” Each successive statement seemed to me more ignorant and trite than the last, and by the end of the interview I was directing my best death glare at the television.

This is indicative of another major problem in modern society, which I touched on briefly the last time I mounted the soapbox: the lack of emphasis on non-coercive, mutual consent. As it so happens, I have examples in my relatively large library of cultural references that I can awkwardly shoehorn in. If that’s not the sort of thing that tickles your fancy, I urge you to investigate the links above regardless, and add your voice to the discussion.

Over the summer, I watched all four seasons of Downton Abbey. It was initially a mild curiosity: at the beginning of the first episode I was otherwise occupied; by the beginning of the second I had dropped everything and fixed my attention on the show. It had pretty much everything that I could want from a televised serial: an extensive and interesting cast of characters, a series of intertwining plots, and British accents everywhere. Perhaps most importantly, it uses its place as a popular show to comment on social issues. Granted, some of their commentary is about as subtle as an anvil to the head, but respect to them for trying.

One of the early plots in the first season, which continues to be important throughout the first two seasons, involves Lady Mary, the oldest daughter of the family, having an illicit encounter with Kemal Pamuk, the son of the Turkish ambassador. Pamuk is handsome, dashing, and exotic–and also revealed, very quickly, as a womanizer. He blackmails one of the footmen into leading him to Lady Mary’s room in the middle of the night. Once there, he pressures Mary over and over again to accept his advances until she finally appears to succumb. Whether or not she actually does is never found out: the next cut is a panicked Mary telling her maid that Pamuk just died in her bed. An Old Testament scholar would posit that he was struck down by God for his iniquity; a less charitable critic would call it a deus ex machina. Either way, the stigma of an unmarried woman having a man in her room at all threatens to ruin Mary’s reputation completely, and for all intents and purposes she is treated as if the entire matter had been her idea.

Now, granted, it’s difficult to pin the blame for anything on the dead, especially if you’re trying to cover up where they died, but the traditional victim-blaming still comes out strong here. The fact of the matter is that Mary wasn’t even given the opportunity to make her own choice because, despite repeatedly telling Pamuk to leave, he continued to attempt to coerce her. When given under duress, whether that duress is physical or emotional, consent is invalid.

Let’s contrast this with an example from one of my favorite RPG series, Dragon Age. BioWare, the company that developed Dragon Age, came out in public support of the “It’s On Us” campaign with a change of profile picture and a post acknowledging the campaign.

Awesome in more than one way.

As an RPG developer, famous for developing and fleshing out the multitudes of characters in each of their games, BioWare has a lot of clout in the geek world, and just like the creators of Downton Abbey, they’re trying to use that power for good. One of the recurring features of BioWare’s RPGs is the ability to romance your party members, and as such a lot of effort is put into making the romance feel right. It wouldn’t do to have you role-playing a sexual predator, after all. My favorite romance in Dragon Age is between the player character and the fantasy-French bard Leliana, and inasmuch as a game can do it shows the growth of a relationship very well. It begins with friendship, which becomes trust, which blossoms into love. The process is very gradual, taking place over the course of several in-game months, and each step of the way is carefully laid out to make sure that this is what you want.

Of course, this is mostly a gameplay feature: the developers wanted to make sure that when your character entered into a romance, they weren’t doing it on accident. But from a story perspective, it’s a good look at the value that a relationship based on mutual consent can have. The tentative approach from both sides makes the relationship all the more endearing, but more importantly it makes it seem more real and more right.

I’ll step down from my soapbox for now, as I’m already late in putting this up. Signing off, until next week!

Spoilers of a general nature follow for The Legend of Zelda and Fire Emblem.

As I was sorting through my library of games earlier this week trying to decide which of my eight copies of Fire Emblem to play (the ninth is at home), I was struck by a sudden flash of insight. It was the kind of insight that, in hindsight, seems completely obvious, but in the moment it occurs seems completely staggering–like, for instance, the word “mayday” being derived from the French “m’aidez”.

In this case, the insight was “Every Fire Emblem has the same plot.” Normally this would be an earth-shattering revelation for me: after all, as evidenced in my earlier post, I’m not the type of person who looks kindly on repetition. Yet, for some reason, the Fire Emblem series is my all-time favorite. If that’s the case, shouldn’t I be vanishing in a puff of logic? Not necessarily, apparently, but this got me to thinking. I realized that my other favorite Nintendo-published series, The Legend of Zelda, reused their plots just as frequently. What exactly is it that makes me want to play through each of the new games in these series if I already know how the plot is going to go?

In each case, it’s in no small part due to familiarity. Humans are naturally biased towards ideas that they’ve encountered (and agreed with) before. In the case of Zelda, this means that fans can always count on Link to be the protagonist and Zelda to show up in a supporting role. It also refers to the core gameplay components: Zelda will always be an adventure game, while Fire Emblem is a turn-based tactical RPG. In essence, when you buy each of these games you know what you’re going to get. If you found one of the past entries in the series enjoyable, then you probably will find the current entries enjoyable as well.

On the other side of the coin is novelty. While the entries in the series can afford to be similar, they’re not exactly the same. Thus, in keeping with the title of this post, I ask “What’s new?”

The plot of most of the Zelda games I’ve played can be summed up fairly easily: you collect the first set of Plot Coupons, get the Master Sword, collect the second set of Plot Coupons, and storm the final dungeon to save the kingdom. Simple. Easy to remember. However, as the common saying goes, the journey is more important than the destination.

Zelda, as an adventure game, is all about the journey. There needs to be a feeling of discovery in any adventure game, which is why each new game in the series has a different overworld, new dungeons, and new items to play around with. While there are some fixtures of the 3D games, such as the bow, bombs, hookshot, and boomerang, the way that they are incorporated differs between games. Both Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask used the items in question in their most basic form, while subsequent Zelda games were able to get more creative with the application: Wind Waker put a cannon on Link’s boat that he could launch bombs from, and allowed him to target up to five things at a time with his boomerang (which, in turn, led to a wider variety of dungeon puzzles and boss fights). Twilight Princess introduced item combinations, giving Link the ability to use his bow like a sniper rifle (when combined with the Hawkeye, an item similar to Wind Waker’s telescope) or a rocket launcher (when combined with bombs), or do the slowest ever Spider-man impression by using two hookshots at the same time. Skyward Sword lets you use the Beetle, a new item, to pick up bombs and drop them on your enemies from halfway across the area. And so it goes.

The tone of the game is also an important way of making the games distinct from each other. Ocarina was a fairly optimistic game until around halfway through, when Link receives the unpleasant revelation that everything he has done so far was playing directly into the villainous Ganondorf’s hands. Ganondorf’s portrayal in the first half of the game is an insidious evil that only the youngest members of the cast recognize for what he is. In the second half of the game, however, he is literally monstrous, ruling over Hyrule with an iron fist while monsters under his command ravage the land. Contrast this with Wind Waker’s Ganondorf, a tired old man who speaks of the trials his people faced living in the desert, and seems to be an almost tragic figure. Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess deal more with the theme of death than any other game in the series–Twilight Princess was the first game in the series to get a T rating for that very reason.

Back to Fire Emblem. Its common plot, while still relatively basic, is a bit more complicated: an idealistic (and almost always blue-haired) hero sets forth in order to protect their homeland from a hostile foreign power. In the background of the hero’s fight against the invaders is some sort of nebulous evil organization, which quickly gains prominence as the true villains of the story. The motive of this organization is always to bring about the return of some Dark Power in order to wreak destruction on the entire world. In every case, the hero gathers a small but loyal band of followers, leading them against ever more powerful enemies until at last they overthrow the invaders and bring down the Dark Power once and for all. Then there are fifteen minutes to half an hour of credits (which nobody pays attention to because they’re too busy reading the story of what happened to each individual in their army) and possibly some ominous foreshadowing hinting at a sequel.

Similar to Zelda, one of the major differences between the games is in tone. The seventh game in the series, Blazing Sword (simply titled Fire Emblem in the West) is a fairly standard fantasy epic, tying its cast into an intrigue-filled story where the power of friendship prevails over all the adversity in the group’s way. The Japanese exclusive Genealogy of the Holy War, on the other hand, is the next best thing to A Song of Ice and Fire: a crisis over the succession of a kingdom, incest as a plot point, religious unrest, and the frequent, brutal deaths of sympathetic characters, with no chance of salvation.

For me, however, the main draw of Fire Emblem is its ever-changing cast of characters and the way they interact with each other. Each game has more than 30 playable characters, all of them with distinct personalities of their own. While some are more fleshed out than others, each and every one has something to make them interesting, regardless of how much focus they receive in the story. Most of this is tied into the mechanic of support conversations: dialogue between characters that has little or nothing to do with the main plot of the game. Supports, in addition to providing a tangible gameplay mechanic in stat bonuses to the affected parties, can also have an effect on character endings or even some of the main story events. Mostly, though, they exist to add interest and flesh out minor characters who don’t get featured as much. A major example of this is in Blazing Sword. Bishop Renault, a character who appears for only two chapters out of almost forty, is given an incredible amount of depth: a troubled and bloodstained past, a history with the main villain, and the vague implication that he became nearly immortal due to magical experimentation. The fact that all of this is optional and unlikely to be seen at all (as Renault is considered to be a mediocre character at best, and standing in place long enough to achieve sufficient support ranks to view all of his conversations would be a considerable waste of time at the climax of the game) makes it all the more impressive.

Awakening, the latest installment in the series, takes the support mechanic a step further, with the return of Holy War‘s inheritance system and the removal of the limits on the number of supports allowed per character. While the North American localization did an excellent job with the translation as a whole, many of the most hilarious, heartwarming, and emotional moments in the game are filed in the Support Log. Seeing all of the different combinations of characters, each one of them excellently written, is the reason I’ve played through the game in its entirety eight times. …the main reason.

To sum up: by innovating in puzzles and items, the creators of Zelda have “itemized” how to create fun gameplay. By devoting so much time and effort to fleshing out the cast, the creators of Fire Emblem have truly put the “care” in “character.”

I will brace myself for the slings and arrows that those puns deserve. See you next week!